Gone are the days when the only way you could call up your friend abroad was Skype or Gtalk. Oh yeah, gone are the days when you had to shout into the microphone, “Can you hear me?” a dozen times before your friend could actually figure out why Skype won’t work.

Today, we have Viber and along with it, a lot of cool alternatives that enable voice chat over the “internet waves”. It’s a really cool app and whoever thought of it, all kudos to you. (Thanks, Talmon Macro!)

Interestingly though, Viber does have a lot of alternatives. On one of my phones, This app doesn’t get activated no matter what I try. So the closest thing I could try is install a good Viber alternative. That’s when I found out that there are indeed a lot of cool alternatives to Viber for the iPhone!

Okay, this isn’t exactly a Viber-alternative but with the capability of video calls, it just takes to an all-new level. Did you say you didn’t want video? Great! You can just replace your video with avatars and you’re done! Free voice calls all along. Tango also adds some spice through a variety of other features like audio notes, messages, filters, and of course, if you’re willing to spend a buck or two, some surprises too!

Fring comes as a decent alternative to any video-calling app you’ll have. I do hear a lot of complaints from a lot of users and the recent update has a 2.5 star-rating but then, if it works just fine for you, why fret a sweat looking for others? Fring isn’t just for voice calls to other Fring users, but also to make video calls to them. Just like Tango, yes.

Vtok is a Google Talk client which connects you to your Gmail contacts via voice, video and text chat. It’s an app that has been doing good for a lot of iPhone users. Vtok isn’t exactly an alternative to voice calls but it is a decent client that makes voice chat through the iPhone (over Google Talk) very easy. The coolest thing is, like Skype, you can make voice calls to people who are logged in from a Mac/PC.

Vonage would be a direct competition to Skype in more ways than one. Like, right now, Vonage lets you make free calls to the U.S and Canada (up to 3000 mins a month). Besides, calls to other Vonage users are free as in Viber. Vonage also lets you make VoIP calls like Skype at what’s supposedly 30% cheaper than Skype rates.

Did you think that FaceTime could be an alternative you could try? Well, if it gets activated, there’s nothing better than FaceTime call which adds crisp audio and video feeds to your connection. Makes things more “real.”

KakaoTalk is a popular alternative too. With about 50 million users, it’s a growing platform with a ton of features.

So what do you use to make those free voice calls? Viber? Or any other app?